Walking together
Theatre Y’s ‘You Are Here’ invites audiences to walk with the company and each other through Chicago’s South and West Sides — a 6-hour experiment that’s new each time
Theatre Y’s “You are Here” invites audiences to walk with the company through the South and West sides.
“It will surprise you. Just give an opportunity for the West and South Sides to shine, because they shine bright on their own if we just come, listen and be present.” — Nadia Pillay, organizer of the North Lawndale walk
On a blistering Sunday afternoon, a walk around North Lawndale as part of Theatre Y’s “You Are Here” series perfectly encapsulated both the promise and the potential pitfalls of the theater company’s ambitious move to the West Side neighborhood.
With “You Are Here: The Emerald Camino Project,” Theatre Y invites participants to a six-hour walking “conversation” through one of the 12 Chicago neighborhoods that make up the “emerald necklace,” a boulevard system linking public parks on the city’s West and South Sides.
Each of the 12 neighborhoods is only visited once as the project rotates through different routes on Saturdays and Sundays through Sept. 26. While last Sunday was North Lawndale, the day before saw a group walk through East Garfield Park, and Labor Day weekend has the company walking through Little Village and Back of the Yards. The theater is offering free admission to those who live in the neighborhood being visited, with
others invited to pay what they can.
This project is a new turn on Theatre Y’s “Camino Project,” which saw ensemble members walk the 500-mile Camino de Santiago in Spain in 2017 before the company crafted a fivemile walk through Bucktown and Humboldt Park in 2019.
The biggest difference between that original 2019 iteration and 2021’s version, according to Theatre Y artistic director Melissa Lorraine, is that members of Theatre Y aren’t the ones doing the talking this time. While 2019’s version included a nonlinear narrative that went alongside the walk, Lorraine said this year’s goal was to find a way to invite the audience to be the guide.
For that, the theater makes an attempt to pair off attendees, with a clear effort to try to match those who live in the area with those who don’t. Along the nearly four-mile walk, Theatre Y guides provide prompts like “When is the last time you sang to yourself or someone else?” or “What’s your most treasured memory?” to spur conversation between pairs.
Depending on your partner, the prompts may result in more interesting responses than others, especially since you never know if a partner will find themselves uncomfortable with the prospect of staring into a stranger’s eyes for four minutes while gentle music plays through an MP3 player
handed out by the company as an (underutilized) audio supplement to the walk.
What Theatre Y can’t have planned for, though certainly likely hoped for, is the added excitement and fun that walking with someone from the neighborhood can bring. Whether it’s because they know every person the walk passes or because they can point out buildings they’ve lived in or played basketball in or, in one instance, where someone tried to rob them, there’s an incredible amount of added nuance simply from engaging with the community on a personal level.
There’s a reasonable fear when a North Side theater moves to another neighborhood that they’ll push to leave their stamp, to make the neighborhood something that it’s not.
To Theatre Y’s credit, the desire to make a “Theatre Y show” has taken a backseat to simply letting the neighborhoods shine in all their glory.
In an interview after the North Lawndale walk, Lorraine acknowledged that producing this show in such a different way than the last iteration has been a lesson in trust and faith.
“As a director, I feel like it’s my responsibility to have control and to make sure that it’s good,” said Lorraine. “This is not that show. This is the show where I have to disappear and nurture what is happening.”
Last year, Lorraine explained, actors chose a neighborhood and were charged with curating the walk for their chosen neighborhood. Over the year since, they met with
community leaders to get recommendations on artists to feature as well as the specific route to be taken through the neighborhood.
Nadia Pillay organized the North Lawndale afternoon with her community organizer Willie Round (aka Prince Roc), who performed alongside Marcus Quinn Jackson in front of the Dr. King Legacy Apartments as well as a solo performance at Stone Temple Baptist Church’s beautiful outdoor stage and garden.
After the event, Pillay admitted that she was a bit worried about people staying the entire time. After all, a six-hour afternoon, especially on a 90-plus degree day, is a tough ask.
One of the few drawbacks to the afternoon was indeed the length of the walk — not the overall mileage as much as the long stints of what felt like unstructured walking time. Presumably this is time to take in the neighborhood. However, as some attendees have noted, it would have been nice to learn more about the actual history of the neighborhood, an aspect that was left out of this iteration of the Camino project and that prompted Theatre Y to hand out fliers for local tours to those looking for a more history-oriented journey through the neighborhood.
Comparatively, the performances felt all too brief.
This imbalance also led to the fear of Theatre Y perhaps over-inserting themselves resurfacing. As a group, the Theatre Y guides would sporadically perform what can only be described as a cross between actors doing spatial viewpoints exercises and some kind of camp counselor group choreography.
Thematically, it wound up simply taking away from time that might have been better spent focusing on the neighborhood. (The culmination of these moments was a final Theatre Y performance that was upstaged by a 3-year-old community member.)
North Lawndale is set to be the future home of Theatre Y. Lorraine said the official location for that home is “in flux right now,” with a couple of options on the table. Still, the company is looking to move into whichever space they land on by summer 2022. Until then, they’re working on a plan to become artists in residence at the Firehouse
Community Arts Center, which served both as a beautiful stop along the route to view the murals painted outside and the location of the walk-ending free meal, helping to craft a curriculum for area youth.
Looking forward, Lorraine said the goal is still to be an international theater based in North Lawndale, creating a bridge for the North Lawndale, and Chicago at large, community to become “global citizens.” They still intend, she continued, to work closely with those within the community.
It’s a delicate balancing act. On the one side you have the strong creative voice of Lorraine’s company and on the other you have the deeply rooted foundations of the South and West Side communities. “You Are Here” is a clear step in the right direction, an effort from Theatre Y to step back and uplift.
During its best moments, “You Are Here” gives space for attendees to pause and, as Pillay said, let go of any preconceived notions that may accompany thoughts of these neighborhoods and to actually, truthfully experience these neighborhoods as they are.
“It will surprise you,” said Pillay. “Just give an opportunity for the West and South Sides to shine, because they shine bright on their own if we just come, listen and be present.”